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In the recent past, considerable progress has been made in the
development of hybrid wheat. One of the bottlenecks in the'
successful production of commercial hybrid wheat is the poor seed set
on the male sterile line by natural cross-pollination. The extent of
hybrid seed set largely depends upon the amount of pollen shed by the
pollinator/restorer (Wilson 1968), which is directly correlated with
anther size (Beri and Anand 1971). Jost and Milohnic (1976) found
significant positive correlation of restoration ability with anther
length. It has been estimated that pollen production per
inflorescence in wheat is only about 10% of that in rye. It is a
common observation that triticales have longer anthers than wheat and
also produce more pollen. So far, no emphasis has been laid to
exploit the alien sources for transfer of long anthers in wheat,
which can otherwise be useful in hybrid wheat production program.
The chromosome 4R of rye, which is involved in the expression of long
anthers, also contains gene(s) for purple coleoptile and culm,
Pc (Miller 1984), aluminum tolerance, Alt 3 (Aniol and
Gustafson 1984), powdery mildew resistance, Pm 6 (Lind 1982),
and waxy endosperm, Wx (Korzun et al. 1997). Moreover, this
chromosome contains a gene for male fertility restoration, Rfc
2 (Hossain and Driscoll 1983), which if linked to long anthers
can have added advantage to exploit rye-introgressed wheats having
these traits to be used as restorers/pollinators in hybrid wheat
production program. Also, the trait under study can act as a good
morphological marker in the basic and applied aspects of crop
improvement. Using the available genetic manipulations, it is
possible to introgress the rye chromatin conferring long anthers into
bread wheat, which will be a boon in hybrid wheat production
technology.
References
Aniol A and Gustafson JP (1984) Chromosome location of genes
controlling aluminium tolerance in wheat, rye and triticale. Can J
Genet Cytol 26: 701-706.
Beri SM and Anand SM (1971) Factors affecting pollen-shedding
capacity in wheat. Euphytica 20: 327-332.
Hossain MA and Driscoll CJ (1983) Fertility compensation of
Cornerstone male sterility of wheat by rye. Genetics 104:
181-189.
Jost M and Milohnic J (1976) Hybrid wheat results in Yugoslavia.
Univ Zagreb, Yugoslavia, 93-98.
Korzun V, Malyshev S, Voylokov A and Borner A (1997) RFLP-based
mapping of three mutant loci in rye (Secale cereale L.) and
their relation to homoeologous loci within the Gramineae.
Theor Appi Genet 95: 468-473.
Lind V (1982) Analysis of resistance of wheat-rye addition lines
to powdery mildew of wheat (Erysiphe graminis f. sp.
tritici). Tagungsbr Akad Landwirtschaftswiss DDR 198:
509-520.
Miller TE (1984) The homoeologous relationship between the
chromosomes of rye and wheat. Current status. Can J Genet Cytol 26:
578-589.
Wilson JA (1968) Problems in hybrid wheat breeding. Euphytica 17
Suppl. 1: 327-332.
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